By the Same TMI Author

Stephen Kaye, editor and publisher, became intrigued with publishing when he heard the wheezing sounds of a flat-bed press and the clanking of the lino type machines while working on his weekly school paper towards the middle of the last century. Since then he worked on a college paper, studied and practiced law for a few decades, went into real estate, farming organic vegetables and grass-fed beef. After a few months of retirement he reverted to childhood fantasies and started The Millbrook Independent to replace the Millbrook Roundtable whose demise created a vacuum that needed filling.

Pankaj Mishra’s latest book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, published earlier this month, presents what Mishra calls “an emotional history” at a time of “worldwide emergency” when rage fills the global political sphere. Mishra locates the core of our chaotic condition in the Nietzchean concept of “ressentiment,” a creative force that animates the rebellion of the poorest and most disenfranchised against the ruling class. It is this very force, Mishra argues, that is animating those most marginalized, its power whetted by the contradiction between the equality promised in prose and exalted in rhetoric but never delivered in reality.

PM: There are several things we should be very suspicious of: intellectuals, specifically liberal intellectuals who normalize and say we should settle down, that “the people have elected this man and we should respect their decision because the people are sacrosanct.” I disagree; the “people” have made unwise political choices many times, and so the will of the “people” can lead to disaster.

The other lesson is that one has to resist as vigorously as possible the destruction of cultural spaces and intellectual platforms. In India, Modi has made dissent nearly impossible; there are similarities in the American experience already, with the National Endowment for the Humanities and other arts organizations facing massive cuts in the Trump Administration. The conditions are different in some respects, but one has to be very unnerved by the rapid undermining of these spaces. As Arendt says, politics has to be a way of life in this moment; we have to form communities of resistance that create a sense of belonging and truth. We cannot stand alone before a semi-fascist state.